Categorisation

Titannica is based on wiki software that makes it possible to sort articles into categories. For a reference source, such as Titannica, this is an invaluable categorisation tool and makes the wiki much more user friendly and easy to navigate.

All articles in a given category are sorted alphabetically. If you want an article to be sorted by something other than its name, you should use the following link form in the article's text:[[Category:Example|Sort key]] (where Example is the category name, and Sort Key is the value to sort the list by).

For example, if we add the Category [[Category:Major Villains]] to the article "Lord Varek Azzur" it will be listed by default under the first letter of the character's first name, "L", because it is the first letter of the article's name. You could instead force the article to be listed by the character's last name ("Azzur, Varek") by using the string [[Category:Major Villains|Azzur, Varek]].

Remember that sort keys are case sensitive, with capital letters being sorted before lower-case letters. Therefore, "Azzur, Varek" would appear in the list before "armies".

Category pages may be added to other categories and are then recognized as sub-categories. For example, you could edit [[Category:Human Villains]] and add the link [[Category:Humans]]. The "Human Villains" category would then be a sub-category of the "Humans" category.

You may want an entry to appear at the beginning of the Category entries list; i.e. before the letter A. For example, in the category "Deities and Spirits" you may want the article "List of Deities and Spirits" to be the first article you see, rather than be buried in amongst the entries beginning with ‘L’. In such cases prefix the sort key with a single blank: for "List of Deities and Spirits", use [[Category:Deities and Spirits| List of Deities and Spirits]]. This way, these articles will appear at the beginning of the list.

For items listed with numbers, leading zeros need to be added in order to maintain the sort. For example, books are often numbered with two digit places ("FF15", or "FF49" etc). It is important in such an example to add a zero to the beginning of the single digit items. So instead of "FF2", write "FF02", otherwise "FF2" would appear after "FF19".

For titles of various things, it may be wise to avoid "The" or "A" occurring at the beginning of the title, e.g. in "The Crown of Kings". To avoid this place the following just above the Categories at the bottom of the page:

In order to ensure that these categories will be useful to users of the wiki, it is important that editors try to ensure that the categorization remains coherent and that duplicate categories are not created. As you have read above you will know how easy it is to create categories and therefore how equally easy it is to create duplicate categories. A simple example would be a category called "FF01 Entries" set up for entries that derive from the first Fighting Fantasy book (The Warlock of Firetop Mountain) could easily be written as "FF1 Entries" (missing the "0") or "FF01 entries" (the "e" being written in lower case as opposed to upper case "E") or indeed creating "Warlock of Firetop Mountain Entries". All of these variations would create different categories. Although fixable (as most things are on a wiki) it can be labour intensive to do so and requires a great deal of vigilance on the part of administrators and users.

For this reason, it is worthwhile to consult the Category Tree to see if there is already a category that fits the criteria you need. Remember, you can have as many categories as you want tagged to an article.

New categories are always welcome. If they are useful and are navigated to easily and logically they add a wonderful dimension to the Titannica. It may be that you want to start a project, say for example about the rulers of Titan’s countries. The category [[Category:Rulers]], might be appropriate to add to the various rulers of Titan. It would then be prudent to add the tag ‘[[Category:Peoples of Titan]]’. Then [[Category:Rulers]] would be a sub-category of [[Category:Peoples of Titan]].